Conventional artistic wisdom skews heavily against drawing from photography. Indeed, the oldest example I’ve found is from Solomon Solomon, arguing against it when cameras were still industrial monstrosities, rather than something we all have in our pocket.

I contend that part of the reason photo drawing sucks is that you have infinite leisure to use the photo. Thus, you dawdle and over-analyze, and it ends up stinky. A live model’s continually subtle shifts make the artist’s brain process the real essence of the pose, even if it’s an hours- long pose. Therefore, if your photo reference is held to a 30 second to 10 minute window, might you be forced to process it faster?

Some web examples of this have cropped up. PixeLovely lets you set parameters that change on a dime. Pose Maniacs is similar, but with a 3D model (for better and worse).

Other unorthodox sites let you fake it, with enjoyably more random results. At times my homepage has included Arkive.org’s random species, Flicker’s Interesting Photos from 7 Days, or Panoptikos, which jams a bunch of photo subreddits together. This lets you hit refresh until you see something you like, then draw it. But you get the two downsides: Choosing your subject (resulting in refreshing for 15 minutes) and no time constraints.

However, the best lifedrawing software out there is right behind this window! Right now! It’s your desktop.

First, spend some time on the internet hoarding pictures of interest. I tend to seek out pics with good costumes, interesting characters, nudes (get this: they’re all over the internet!), faces, and animals, but I try not to be picky. Save ’em all in a giant folder. Mine’s got over 14,000 pics!

Next, change your desktop background preferences to use that directory, and change randomly every 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, etc. Set your computer down, and just draw whatever shows up as your new wallpaper.

Here’s a WIP shot of a guy I call “The broker.” Imagine him as a floormonger on some sci-fi commodities trading market. The final design will have red LED stock-tickers and news bulletins scrolling along his belt and shoulder apparati.

My modeling approach with this dude has been experimental and strange. Many methods exist for “sketching” a sculpt in 3D. Dynamic topology, Zspheres, Blender’s skin modifier. But all of these require under-the-hood nurturing that, in my opinion, makes you lose the effortless quickness that you can have with drawing by hand.

When you’re drawing in that way, a favorite technique is to just use big abstract circles and lines of action to represent a head, a muscle, a torso. Where is the equivalency in 3D? Here’s the modifier stack I came up with.

From here, you can just Shrinkwrap clothes onto the character, then begin retopology modeling what you actually want. I got something that felt really alive and stylish, and the model served as some baseline concept art.

Should I take this to sculpt first, then finish modeling? I don’t know. Instincts say yes, but I’m having fun with some old-fashioned modeling first, sculpt later pipeline.

Hiding out in the shelves of my books, I discovered a mysterious sketchbook that I never scanned! Probably because it was started 3 months before my baby was born, and thus existed in a very tertiary time. A bit of everything; some lifedrawing, some monsters, some animals, etc.

“Cuncant that another would finish his sentences for him, he druider would smilabit eggways.” Drawing brainstorm technique: pick a line at random from Finnegan’s Wake, and try to draw it. http://finwake.com/

Come July, I was feeling stagnant in my sketchery, so I mixed it up with a toned sketchbook. It was slow going, and I was swimming in uncharted waters, but by the end I felt like I’d worked out lots of the kinks. Here’s the best stuff!

A lot of this was trying to figure out new mediums. Case in point, my beloved mechanical drafting pencils show up too light against the gray paper 😦 I still love ’em…time to experiment with cracking open some black watercolor pencils and sticking their pigment tube in a mechanical drafting pencil.

This guy was one of my fellow presenters at SeaGL this year. I’m looking forward to the next one!

Dino toys from the Burke Museum.

Breakthrough! With this guy I finally figured out Uniball white gel pens, which are super-annoying if you use ’em like a normal pen. Their ink flow is conspicuously cantankerous, but if you draw lightly in lil circles it flows out. You can do that until you have a lil pool of pigment, then smear it with a finger to get a gradient. Once I figured this out, it was my go-to white over charcoal and pencil. You can really stack the layers; white over black, over white over black overwhiteoverblackoverwhite. Goes on opaque, sticks around.

Ever wanna hang and draw with other Seattleites? Seth Goodkind runs the awesome Ballard Sketch Team. Good for the artistic humors; my last 3 weeks of sketching were better than my previous 3 months, and I gotta put the blame on BST.

Lee Marvin

My baby Susan, figuring this walking thingy out.

More stuff from Sketch Team. The guy with the computer hair was our most excellent server.

Learning from my watercolor exploits, I filled a second water brush with india ink. Awesomee!!! Blocks blacks (say that 10 times fast) right quick, but it lacks the nice gradients of the watercolor blacks.